A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

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Saturday, March 2, 2013

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING -- FINAL PART

Marx needs a language whose syntactic and tropic resources are rich enough
to permit him to perform a number of literary and theoretical tasks
simultaneously.First of all -- and
this, I urge on you, is absolutely indispensable -- the language of Marx's
discourse must permit him to represent the quantitative relationships that
actually obtain in capitalist production and exchange.In other words, it must be a language and a
set of concepts with which he can formulate a satisfactory theory of price, or,
more broadly, a satisfactory theory of distribution and growth.Many modern students of Marx, who come to him from the disciplines of
philosophy, literature, political science, or history fail to recognize the
absolute necessity of this requirement.Puzzled, or else discouraged, by the complexities of the classical
theory of natural price, and unable to master the modern mathematical
reinterpretation of Marx's theories, these readers allow themselves to imagine
that Marx's vision of capitalism can be rendered in purely qualitative and
social-psychological terms.But Marx
himself knew better.Only an account of
capitalism that establishes with quantitative precision the locus and magnitude
of exploitation can hope to accomplish the destructive critique that Marx
thought himself to have devised.But this is merely one half of the task Marx faced, for while revealing the
quantitative determination of prices, wages, and profits, and thereby the
underlying structure of exploitation, the language of Capital must permit Marx also to articulate the structure of
mystification that conceals the exploitative and self-destructive character of
capitalism.It must be possible, in this
language, not merely to state a theory of price alongside a theory of
mystification, but actually to capture linguistically the way in which the
mystification of value and equal exchange serve as the necessary surface
appearance of the underlying structure of exploitation.In addition, the language of an appropriate political economy must serve to
implicate the speaker in the very patterns of mystification that are
exposed.It must be a language that can
express a self-understanding of our own false consciousness, and of the degree
to which we have managed to liberate ourselves therefrom.As this last point, even now, may be unclear,
let me spend just a few moments expanding on the idea.For some years now, cattycorner across West Barbee Chapel Road from my condo
there has been a small coffee shop called The Bean Trader.In the large parking lot for the Harris Teeter
supermarket just opposite the cafe, one often sees parked a sleek blue car with
the provocative North Carolina license plate "116Bway."Since I know, as an old upper West Side Manhattan
resident, that 116th St. and Broadway is the location of Columbia University, I
was curious about the owner.When I
walked over to the car one day to look inside for any evidences of the owner's
identity, I noticed that the car is a Bentley, which is to say a car indistinguishable
from a Rolls Royce save for the famous RR grill.Now I do not keep track of the prices of
super luxury cars, but I was pretty sure that I was looking at a quarter of a
million dollars of automobile.Somehow,
even though I did not find the car especially attractive, and despite my deep
understanding of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism, I felt a slight
tingle, a little thrill, at the thought of so much money sitting in front of me
on the hoof, as it were.Eventually, by
the way, I found out that the car belongs to the owner of the Bean Trader, a
wealthy UNC surgeon who attended Columbia as an undergraduate and never got
over it.I have been to the Louvre in Paris, and I have seen the Mona Lisa behind its thick plate of protective glass in a little
room off the Denon wing.It is not, by a
long shot, my favorite painting in that gallery, but I am incapable of looking
at it without being aware of the enormous price it would bring if it were ever
actually to be offered at auction.In short, I, and I imagine virtually everyone in the modern world,
experiences as thought it were an objective fact the exchangevalue of
commodities.I may mock this awareness,
I may rail against it, I may ostentatiously deny it by wearing old clothes and
riding a rickety bicycle and refusing to bathe, but, like the lapsed Catholic
who still feels the tug of the confessional, I cannot achieve the innocence
satirized in The Gods Must Be Crazy.We are implicated in the mystifications of
commodity fetishism, our world view incorporates into itself the distortions
and dehumanizations wrought by capitalism, and therefore the only truly honest
way to describe these phenomena is through the use of an ironic voice that
acknowledges our implication while it works to destroy it.But the language we use for our characterization of capitalism cannot be
entirely self-contained in its scope of theoretical applicability.It must offer the resources for an eventual
transcendence of the mystifications of the capitalist marketplace.All this, I suggest, Marx sought to accomplish by means of the ironic
discourse of the opening chapters of Capital.Writing for an audience that had been reared
on the mysteries and incantations of Christianity, he invoked its most powerful
metaphors to force upon his readers a self-awareness of their complicity in the
inversions and fetishism of capitalist market relations.By "coquetting with Hegel," as he
himself described his discussion of the concepts of value and money, Marx
clearly hoped to jolt the complacent apologists of capitalism into a
realization of the opacity, mystery, and underlying irrationality of their
putatively transparent explanations of prices, wages, and profits.If I am correct in my reading of Capital,
then we must reject, or at least significantly reinterpret, Marx's oft-repeated
claim that his political economy, in
contradistinction to that of so many of his predecessors, is scientific.In advancing that claim, Marx clearly had two
contrasts in mind, both of which, I think, are sustained by my reading of the
text.First, he meant to counterpose his
work to that of the utopian socialists, who, he thought, conjured their
fantasies of a better world with little or no analysis of the structure of
capitalism and its root in exploitation.Second, he wished to contrast his work, and that of selected authors
such as Ricardo, to the superficial apologetics of the post-Ricardians whom he
stigmatized as vulgar economists.Scientific political economy, he held,
penetrates the surface appearances to reveal the objective structure of
exploitation underneath, whereas vulgar economy, like the pseudoscience of the
denizens of Plato's cave, merely contents itself with predicting the flicker of
the shadows on the wall.Clearly, Marx is right to insist that his
enterprise be disassociated both from utopian dreaming and vulgar apologetics. But in another, more modern, sense of the term
"scientific" Marx is wrong about his own enterprise, and indeed about
social analysis and critique in general.Precisely because Marx's vision of capitalist society requires for its
expression an ironic authorial voice, Capital
is not, in the modern acceptation, a scientific work.Its insights and revelations are imperfectly
rendered by a textbook redaction of the theory of surplus value.Like a great novel, a great work of social
theory is an inherently perspectival rendering of an authorial vision.Its truth as well as its power resides at
least in part in the ironic implication of its author in the mystifications and
injustices that it exposes.It
is for this reason that we continue to read Capital a century and a half after
its publication.And it is for this
reason, as well, that we who aspire to follow Marx's path must struggle to find
for ourselves a voice in which to speak of the inversions, the mystifications,
the verrücktheit, of our own age.

3 comments:

If Capital has a fundamentally ironic structure, doesn't this imply an ironic distance between Marx himself and the "Marx" who purports to be the author of the book? If so, was Marx himself aware of this distance or was he himself at least partially the victim of his own irony?

That is an interesting question, and I don't have a snappy answer to it. Novelists, of course, often adopt an ironic relation to their narrators [see Thackery and Becky Sharp, for example], but CAPITAL is not a novel. I think Marx was fully aware of the complexity of the "voice" in which he wrote CAPITAL, for all that he might not have described it as I have. There are lots of places [some of which I cite] in which he makes it clear that he understands the multi-layered nature of what he is saying.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.